"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." - Robert A. Heinlein

- Raph Koster opines brilliantly on the CopyBot meme. CopyBot, if you haven't heard is an open source app for Second Life which creates copies of in-game objects. Since Second Lifers can create AND SELL in-game objects, this open source app has some ramifications upon the in-game economy, to say the least. Raph's commentary is the most thorough and objective I've read so far (though there's too much posting on this subject to have read but a fraction). In it he points out that this is essentially another example of how ALL content is being commoditized and the money of the future is in services. I agree! It also deserves reading if only for the fact that he uses the line "hoist by their own petard", which in my book is deserving of a blogging-pulitzer! :-)

One more thing on CopyBot. Raph's post goes into some detail about client vs server, data streams vs tokenized streams, etc. Bottom line being that the more you stream/store on the client, the more you open up to copy, or 'theft' if you prefer. It'll be interesting whether the solution for copybot (and what's likely to be hundreds of derivatives) is (a) move more upstream to server side - unlikely as current bandwidth requires the 'local cache', (b) commoditization of content and a 'potato famine/gold rush combo' of a move to services - doubtful as the ingame economy may likely collapse before they could evolve the services model, or (c) evolution of some in-game DRM for content combined with an arms race of client-'malicious'-code-detection against the evolving copybot variants.

(c) seems the most likely, and also seems a losing battle. Will be very interesting to keep an eye on this one.